The Dickens Mirror (51 page)

Wait a second
. Emma clapped a hand to her mouth to keep in the shout. Meredith’s words were like a clear white dagger plunging straight through her brain.
That sounds like a story I know. Did I read it, or was it a movie or …

“Meredith, darling.” Frank tried catching her hands. “It was just a bad dream. It was the drugs, that’s all.”

“Felt so
real
. I … I
killed
you, Frank. I killed our daughter; I crashed the car … and I died, I felt myself die …”

Dream
. Emma’s insides curled like snails frightened into their shells. She recognized this now as part of her nightmare. She also had a sense she was the
only
one of them all to have had it, too.
Rima doesn’t know this part, and neither does anyone else. Only me, just me
.

“Darling, you’re stressed. You’ve been through a ringer. The hospital, the treatments.” Frank drew his wife’s hands to his chest. “Love, it’s Lizzie’s illness eating at you. Remember what the doctors said. You have to take it easy, let it go.”

“Take it
easy
?” Snatching her hands back, Meredith let out a cawing, almost crazed laugh. Her hands fluttered like
broken-winged birds. “Let it
go
? Look where I am, Frank! It’s one thing to visit; it’s another to be
brought
by
her
, and there are these
others
who shouldn’t be here at all, who don’t belong outside their …” She choked that off. “And you don’t think I have the
right
to know what the hell’s going on? What that
bitch
means by the
first
?”

“Temper.” The crazy lady did a tut-tut, like Mary Poppins gone over to the Dark Side of the Force. “I mean precisely what I said. Everything
you
are, what you see when you look in the mirror, my dear? You owe all that to me.”

“No.” But Emma could tell that this was the kind of
no
that meant
no no no, I can’t hear this
. “No,” Meredith repeated. “That’s not right. Look where you are. It’s the other way around.”

“Deep in your soul, you know that is not true. You know that
I
am the template, the first and the last, your alpha and omega,” the crazy lady said. “I am the original Meredith McDermott, not you.”

We

I KNEW IT
.
We’re the originals. These others are only impostors and pieces
.

As she’d watched and listened to everything unfold through the mind’s eye in Emma’s down cellar prison, Elizabeth thought she would feel more smug about that, but something her mother said gnawed:
I am the template
. The first Meredith; the original Meredith; Meredith, the person. Yet if that was true, why had her father felt the need to make a copy at all?

Her eyes strayed to the other Meredith, her bandaged arms. Her own mother had done that. The scars were hidden by her long sleeves, but they were there.

And I’ve done the same
. Her hand strayed to her scarred left forearm.
But mine was for a purpose. There was a reason. I needed to understand the symbols
. But for her and her mother and now this
other
Meredith … for them
all
to do so was wrong. She’d have thought her father would have corrected that in the copies.
Unless he can’t. Maybe it’s as fundamental as the color of our eyes
. So each and every piece of her or her mother was contaminated? Like
mother, like daughter? Self-murder was inevitable? Is that why, every now and again, she actually thought she sometimes heard her mother’s voice

can’t you see how sick she is

that’s not your father

in her head as well? She never had understood that.

But no, that can’t be. Mother’s not a piece. She’s original. She is herself, as am I
. She was hearing a … a memory, some argument between her parents drifting to the fore, that was all.

Her destiny might not be fixed or inevitable either. That copy’s daughter—that Meredith’s Elizabeth—had died from a disease she’d never heard of. Leukemia? Yes, and
that
was the event that unhinged her. She wondered when that had happened, at what age the other Meredith’s daughter took ill.
Because I
am
sick
. There were moments she thought she really
might
be dying and that living a life cooped up in hospital was
all
the life she knew.

Ridiculous, of course; that constable had come on her fleeing some horror.
But I can’t remember from whence, or what it was I saw, other than vague impressions of coming on bodies in some underground labyrinth
. Like this place, down cellar? No, ridiculous. Absurd.
My father was
doing
something to the bodies, those girls and boys, if I remember right
. They’d been roughly her age—although had there been a younger, smaller child, or two? She couldn’t recall.

Here was something else that didn’t tally. When Doyle found her, she’d been bleeding, badly. Yet if her father had been there with her, wouldn’t he have done something to staunch the flow, bandage her? Prevent her from being injured in the first place? So why hadn’t he?
Unless he really wasn’t there at all—and where was
that,
exactly? Was it even in this
Now
?—and I only imagined it
.

But there
were
bodies. That inspector, Battle, said so, as did Kramer. That hadn’t been her imagination.

My God
. Her stomach tightened. Kramer said that what had bound itself to her blood would save this world and remake it. He’d said that
her
blood, rich with shadows, was responsible for healing Weber’s injuries. The shadows hadn’t always been there, of course; they’d come with Emma.

Yet what if her father had been after roughly the same thing?

I carry pieces. I hear voices
.

So did her father require what she carried in her body and mind: a certain piece, an animus that would infuse a spark in a way that was wholly different from the faceless, anonymous man-things of Kramer’s construction?

What if her father needed her blood to make those girls and boys … into people?

SOMETHING ELSE NIGGLED
.

How had she escaped her father? He was strong, a man, and she was a slip of a thing and ill, besides.

Perhaps the correct question was,
had
she escaped at all?

What if he’d let her go, returned her to this
Now
?

Or if she’d never left it … how had he gotten out?

And why hadn’t he taken her with him?

“I TOLD YOU,”
she said, slipping her gaze from the mind’s eye to her right. “You’re pieces and copies, and that’s all you’ll ever be.”

“If that makes you feel better.” Emma’s voice had taken on the curious burr of Eric and the others, who were all clustered round as if she were the candle and they, the moths. It had started as soon as Emma unlocked their down cellar prison and Eric unfurled like a blighted black rose. Elizabeth hadn’t liked that, but Bode’s life had hung in the balance and there was no other way. Unnerving, too, the way Emma could be both
here
, in this down cellar, and out
there
—talking to Kramer, her mother, her
father
, the false Meredith—at the same time. Even more troubling was how the longer Eric stayed with Emma, in the very front of her mind, the closer these other silhouettes and shadows clustered.

So like those blanks in the cells, too
. And what had
they
been about? Yes,
she’d
sometimes thought of the other patients as
faceless
, nothing but open mouths and sound, but
Meme
had been the one to say it.

Emma thought it had something to do with energy—
look at the way the rocks glow; everything wavers; it’s like the barn in the valley
—though it was beyond Elizabeth what the other girl was babbling about.

“Whether Bode is a real person or just a piece who thinks he is, your mother or Kramer will get rid of him. They’ll kill this London’s Tony and Rima, too.” Of them all in this down cellar space, Emma’s face was the most substantial, because she really was strongest. Elizabeth had noticed that even in this gloaming, the other’s birthmark was a very bright glister. Kramer was right; the shadows were Emma’s power. “Obviously Meme would have to go, too, considering that she’s my double,” Emma said.

“But not an exact match.” It was the one Emma called Rima. She was not as well-defined as Emma or even half as fleshed out as Eric, though Elizabeth could make out obsidian stones in the
deep hollows of the thing’s eyes. Unlike Eric, it had taken time for Rima to put together sentences. At first, her voice had been only a toneless sough. The longer Emma was here with them, though, the more defined they all became. “Your eyes are different,” Rima said.

“She’s way more complete than the man-things, though.” It was a shadow-boy, more a smoky pillar than anything formed, but she thought that was because the stain left in Casey ran deep. He couldn’t seem to settle well, and his voice oscillated amongst several registers. To Elizabeth, the boy’s tones grated like a symphony of kazoos, each buzzing a different tune. He was a strange one, too, his eyes so different even from Emma’s. Of the precious few glimpses she’d gotten, she saw they were indeterminate, never quite settling but slipping from black to silver to gray and back again. “I wonder why?” Casey said.

“I’m sure I don’t know about Meme,” Elizabeth said. “She’s Kramer’s creature.”
Never realized the literal truth of that
. “Until now, I didn’t know my mother was in league with Kramer at all. I haven’t seen her in ages.”

And how do I feel about that? Really? To know that my mother has been rounding up these people?
She frowned over that last word. It wouldn’t do to think of them as complete, whole individuals. And yet … her eyes fixed on the Tonys, dying in their cages. On Rima, so willing to give of herself to save another. That little girl, Emma: how she cared for them.
They bleed. They feel
.

What did she know of that kind of connection? What had
she
ever felt but anger and pain and confusion?

Have I been nothing but a pawn, a … a
vessel
?
My God, if Kramer really could empty her of all the pieces, bleed her dry, what would be left? She could almost imagine that she might be
like those faceless man-things: the approximation of a person, but soulless. Perhaps she was even closer to Meme than she realized? Even if they were nothing but copies and pieces based on her, Emma and the shadows, Bode and his friends … they all had
lives
. They could love.
Did
love and care for one another, and fiercely.

But have I ever? What am I? Who am I, really? Where is
Elizabeth
in all this?

“What about little Emma?” Rima’s words oscillated like the rapidly plucked strings of a violin. “Is that really you out there? Do you remember this at all?”

“No.” Emma touched her chin. “But I remember clocking myself. Took that header off my bike the week after down cellar. My
blinks
started up around the same time. But I sure don’t remember
blinking
here.”

“Could be a different Emma.” Eric’s voice was a hollow hum. “Maybe your accident is a branch-point. A pivot: you went one way, and that little girl went another.”

“Maybe.” Emma sounded troubled. “You know what I don’t understand? For the sake of argument, let’s say what we heard in the valley is the truth: we’re all characters from McDermott books.”

“And you’re the only escapee,” Eric said. “The one who got free of the page and then gave that ability to me and Casey.”

“That’s kind of too much to process, but okay. Think about it. So far, Elizabeth’s mom has gone only into
books
I recognize: Rima’s, Tony’s. Chad is from
Echo Rats
. I’m not saying that we all don’t feel or aren’t, weren’t real … but why hasn’t Elizabeth’s mother gone outside book-worlds to other
Nows
? Where’s the Rima from a spaceship or something? Where’s Chad as a girl, or the guy who didn’t go to ’Nam?”

“Oh, isn’t it obvious?” Elizabeth couldn’t contain herself. “The point is to rid me of
you
, not go around murdering innocent,
true
, whole people.”

“Or perhaps your mom can locate only those versions who were actually there, in the valley,” Emma said.

“Doesn’t explain the McDermotts,” Rima said.

“No. Actually, I think it might.” When Emma shook her head, her hair and face eddied and smoked into swirls of shadow that drifted and undulated before settling back into place like the coils of an elaborate coiffure. “Meredith said she dreamt about being afraid of Frank and blowing him up, remember? Well,
I
saw a lot of that in those Lizzie
-blinks
. House showed me the moment of the crash. I
know
Meredith was dying.
She
thinks it’s a nightmare or a hallucination or something, but it really happened.”

“Yeah, but if Elizabeth’s mother is right,” Eric said, “how do you know that what you saw didn’t happen in a book?”

A burst of impatience. “What
is
that?” Elizabeth demanded. “This
nightmare
you all keep yammering on about. I’ve no idea what you mean.”

“Nightmares? They happen when you sleep,” Eric said.

“What? Sleep is
sleep
. Sleep is nothing. It’s
blank
.”

Emma and Eric looked at one another, and then Emma said, “Elizabeth, what happens when
you
go to sleep?”

“Happens?” When
was
the last time she’d slept? She couldn’t recall.
Have I ever slept?
She really wasn’t certain. “Nothing. I close my eyes. I open them. That’s all.”

“So no images, no pictures? It’s just … black?”